Wanted: 1,400 sales jockeys to flog Oracle Cloud

Oracle today unveiled a massive EMEA recruitment drive for its “cloud sales work force”.

The enterprise software giant wants to hire 1,400 new salespeople in six locations: Amsterdam, Cairo, Dubai, Dublin, Malaga and Prague. It's also building new sales centres in Amsterdam and Cairo. They will get 600 cloud apps along with on-premise hardware, software and services, of course, to get their heads around.

Goodness knows how big this investment is, but Oracle pays its salespeople very well. And goodness knows what this means for the sales reps who have carved out their careers selling traditional on-prem software licences.

The company has a massive customer base but it is under pressure from the likes of SaaS-only players such as Salesforce and Workday, as well as more traditional rivals such as SAP and Microsoft who "got" cloud more quickly than Big Red.

Oracle talks a great cloud game - it says it has in the last six months added nearly 1,500 new software as a service (SaaS) customers and more than 2,100 platform as a service (PaaS) customers. But while its definition of what constitutes cloud revenues is opaque, today’s news shows that its ambitions for cloud revenues are crystal clear. ®